Things are getting a little bit crazier in northern VT. The weather starting to turn. We are beginning to get frost warnings at night, and there's a pretty significant coating of fallen leaves over everything. While the weather is beautiful (and this is just about my favorite time of year), there's still lots to be done at 100 High Meadow Lane to get ready for the imminent arrival of the freezing cold. Joe's been working on getting the plumbing roughed in, and this task, as mentioned before, is pretty much done. Then we can get everything hooked up through our new water equipment and get the septic system operational. Viola, no more trips to the woods with a shovel. To further get the inside ready for winter, we obviously have to be able to heat the joint. We've got the parts of our heating system (furnace, radiators, etc) littered around the house, and we just buried a giant propane tank off the west end of the house. All that will be coming soon.

As Julie mentioned, we decided to sub out the building of the chimney (and interior hearth work as well). We were fully aware that we didn't have time to do this ourselves before winter, and had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd heat the house solely with fossil fuels. But several factors changed our minds. First, propane isn't free (or anywhere close to it), while we've got a big pile of dry, split wood sitting withing twenty feet of the house. Second, it will be easier to do the siding with the chimney in place than it would just imagining where it should be. It will be really nice to just have it done, and Randy was actually going to start some prep work on it this very evening.

The other big pre-winter task is the siding. While we don't actually need it to protect the house for the winter, we do need to have it done to close on our construction loan, which will come due before spring comes to Vermont. So we'll do siding now, and save tasks like drywall and such for colder months (when the house is being actively heated). It's a big undertaking, and goes rather slowly. I've asked Joe a million questions, and spent much of the last couple weeks just working on this.

The pictures kind of show the stepwise progression of what we've done with the house exterior. Over the plywood is the white "housewrap", which is a functional weather barrier, and has been on the house for a couple months now. It's a running joke around here that this is also called "Vermont siding", since a lot of people leave they're residences in this phase for quite some time. We then put the 2" of rigid insulation over the housewrap. This stuff comes in 2'x8' sheets, and we pretty much covered the entire house with the insulation in just a few days. We only left a little space under the soffits so they could be more easily installed. This insulation is not a suitable surface for applying the siding, so we've then had to go around the house and attach 1"x3" vertical strapping, using big 4" screws that will go all the way through the insulation and into the plywood underneath. We put it up every 18" and around all the doors and windows and corners, or this has taken quite a bit of time (and we've only put it up where we've been working on the siding so far.)

The siding we're using is cedar. Before the actual siding goes up, we've had to go around and put cedar trim around all the doors, windows, corners, etc. Finally, last Saturday, we got enough prep work done to start putting up the clapboards. It was well worth the wait, as the siding is gorgeous. The pictures don't even do it justice (in my opinion). The east end of the house (with the scaffolding) as shown is a few days progress, though much of that was spent screwing around with the scaffolding itself. It's 30' from the ground to the roof peak, and it's pretty precarious. The progress in front of the garage, I'm proud to say, I did in just two days working by myself. I'm a machine. Well, me and Oakley (and a little Jack Johnson).

Also, the siding project has allowed me to purchase two new fun tools for the project, a siding nail gun, and a cordless power saw. Very sweet.